When the last of the survivors came out, Catherine Demain hurried after his stretcher. Lisa stood where she was. The crowd began to murmur again, to talk excitedly. The rest of the crew who had gone Earthside stepped through the airlock hatch, each of them wearing that same grin of victory. As each of them came into sight, the crowd cheered and applauded. The noise was growing, building, reverberating off the rock walls and ceiling. One by one, the men who had participated in the mission came out and were quickly surrounded by friends, family, lovers.
And then, last of all, came Douglas Morgan. His smile was not as broad as the others’. There was less of joy and relief in it, more of irony and doubt. But only Lisa saw this. The others simply roared their approval once they saw him, rushed to him cheering wildly and raised Douglas to their shoulders.
He looked genuinely surprised. Lisa saw that his eyes were tired, sleepless. His coverall was grimy and stained with what might have been blood along one sleeve.
But the crowd noticed none of this. All they knew was that Douglas had led the expedition to Earth, had brought back living survivors of the holocaust, had proved that they were not totally cut off from their mother world, had shown that the Earth was not entirely dead.
They paraded with him on their shoulders and cheered themselves hoarse. Their noise was absolutely head-splitting. But Lisa stayed where she was, her hands at her sides no matter how much she wanted to press them to her ears.
Almost as an afterthought, a pair of wildly laughing men grabbed her and hoisted her up onto their shoulders, then fought their way through the circling, howling, triumphant mob to march side-by-side with their pair holding Douglas aloft. He looked at her and grinned boyishly, almost guiltily. He shouted some words at her but Lisa could not hear them over the ceaseless animal roar of the mob.
Douglas laughed and shrugged his broad shoulders. Lisa knew, in an utterly unmistakable flash of insight, that her husband could lead these people wherever he chose to take them. They worshipped him. And she knew with equal certainty that he would throw it all away, that he did not want to be their leader, that he thought it all an absurd cosmic joke.
Then she looked back over her shoulder at Kobol, standing alone now back by the open airlock hatch, his face twisted with anger and envy, halfway between weeping and murder.
* * *
Dr. Robert Lord sat staring at the open refrigerator. There were only four lumps of what had once been food in it, but now they were green, slimy, shapeless blobs that dripped between the rungs of the refrigerator shelves. The stench made his stomach heave. The emergency power generator had run out of fuel four days earlier, and the food had quickly rotted.
Fungus, Lord thought. At least the simple life forms are still working.
His stomach pangs were so insistent that his hand started to reach out for the festering mess.
“No!” he said aloud. The sound startled him. He pulled his hand away, then grabbed the edge of the refrigerator door and slammed it shut. Slowly, weak with hunger and the fever that was sapping his strength, he made his way out of the observatory’s basement kitchen, up the spiral iron stairs that clanged as hollow as his stomach, and entered the big dome.
The telescope stood patiently, a massive monument to a dead civilization. With each step across the cement floor Lord’s boots echoed eerily through the vast, sepulchral dome. He had always thought of the astronomical observatory as a sacred place. Now it was truly a tomb. He was the only one left alive in it. Two days after the sky had burned, a wild, frenzied mob from the town had sacked the observatory, killing everyone they could find in their madness and hatred for scientists.
“It’s their fault!” the mob screamed as they attacked the handful of men and women in the observatory.
Lord had fled to the film vault and locked himself in without waiting to see if any of the others could reach its safety after him. The vault was almost soundproof, but some of the tortured shrieks of his colleagues and students seeped through, burning themselves into his mind. He waited two days before he dared to come out, weak from hunger, filthy from his own excrement. They were all dead. The pert little Robertson girl had made it almost to the door of the vault before they found her, stripped her, and raped her to death.
Lord knew he should have buried them, but he did not have the strength. Now, as he tottered across the observatory’s main dome, smudged here and there by fires that the mob had started, there was no one to talk to, to confess to, except himself.
“It was a solar disturbance,” he said to the empty, silent dome. His voice quavered and echoed in the accusing shadows. “Maybe a mild nova. My paper on the fluctuations of the intrinsic solar magnetic field... it’ll never be published now. There’s nobody left to read it.”
He sank to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and cried until he collapsed exhausted on the cold cement floor.
For weeks he had patiently sat at the observatory’s solar-powered radio, calling to other astronomical observatories around the world. When none answered, he swept the frequency dial from one end to another, searching for sounds of life.
He heard voices. There were people out there. But the tales they told made his blood freeze. Cities blasted into radioactive pits. Disease ravaging the countryside. Maddened bands of looters prowling the land, worse than animals, killing for the insane joy of it, raping and torturing and enslaving anyone they found.
Lord shuddered, remembering their voices, pleading, angry, bitter, sick, frightened. He still heard them sometimes, and not always in his dreams.
One woman, a psychology professor at Utah State, actually engaged him in a pleasant conversation over several days, reporting clinically on the devastation of Salt Lake City, the enormous levels of radiation that blanketed the state thanks to the heavy megatonnage that had been targeted for the mobile missile sites along the Nevada border. The wrath of the Lord, she had called it, not knowing his name.
On her last day she told him with mounting excitement in her voice as she watched a group of young men nosing around the wrecked campus. Her excitement turned to disgust as they set buildings on fire and finally broke into the room she was in. She left the radio on as the marauders kicked down her door and poured into the room. Lord could still her screams whenever he tried to sleep.
Her screams awoke him.
He was lying on the cold cement floor of the observatory, exhausted and stiff. And starving. He could not tell how much of his weakness was due to the fever that raged through him, how much the fever was due to his hunger. Every muscle in his frail body ached hideously. It was dark now inside the dome. Night had fallen.
Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself to his feet and tottered outside to the balcony ringing the observatory dome. In the shadows of night, the forest was as dark and mysteriously alive as ever. The warm breeze rustled the leafy boughs the way it always did. Insects buzzed and chirped. Frogs sang their peeping song.
“It’s only the men who have disappeared,” Lord whispered to himself. “Life goes on without us.”
He wondered idly, almost calmly, if he were the last man alive on Earth. Why wonder? he asked himself. Why prolong it? The world will be better, safer, without us. With eyes that glittered of fever and the beginnings of madness he stared down from the parapet ringing the balcony into the inky darkness that fell away to the forest floor a hundred feet below.
“Life goes on without us,” he repeated, and cast his head up for one last glimpse of the stars.
The stars!
Lord gaped at the sight. He had hoped for a glimpse of them, but the clouds had broken at last, after weeks of virtually uninterrupted overcast, and the stars were blazing at him in all their old glory, ordered in the same eternal patterns across the sky. Ursa Major, Polaris, the long graceful sweep of Cygnus, Altair, Vega—they were all there, beckoning to him. Lord almost fainted at the splendor of it.
The Moon rode high in the sky, a slim crescent with a strange unwinking star set just on the dark side of its terminator.
“It can’t be...” he muttered to himself. But even as he said it, he stumbled through the shadows to one of the low-powered binoculars set into steel swivel stands along the balustrade. They had been put in place for visitors, a sop to keep them from pestering the staff to look through the big telescope. They were ideal for gazing at the Moon.
Hands trembling, Lord focused the binoculars on that point of light. It resolved itself into several rings of lights: the surface domes of the lunar colony.
“They’re alive up there,” he whispered to himself, almost afraid that if he said it too loudly the lights would wink out. “Of course... they live underground all the time. The flare wouldn’t have affected them, only their instruments on the surface.”
He stood erect and stared naked-eyed at the Moon. “They’re alive!” he shouted. The lights did not disappear.
Babbling with nearly hysterical laughter, Lord staggered to the stone stairs that led down to the observatory’s parking lot. A dozen cars were there, surely at least one of them would have enough fuel in its tank to take him as far as... where?
